Application of Radio Frequency Identification in Intelligent Distributed Manufacturing System

ABSTRACT: Radio-frequency identification (RFID) has become a remarkable technology among industrial manufacturers to enhance automation systems. It provides the unique identification number with conforming international global standards for each tagged item which is monitored or traced. RFID system competes with other automated identification devices e.g. barcode scanners and smart cards with regard to high speed scanning, reliability and accuracy. The purpose of the current study is to propose a reference model based on RFID application for the process control of industrial distributed system in order to enhance productivity, efficiency, utilization as well as decreasing idle time. The reference model is composed of production and assembly systems which are integrated with RFID system. In addition, the real time data monitoring, allocated to activities of tagged products throughout the manufacturing cells, was illustrated with the purpose of satisfying operation types. Three cases were simulated for measuring performance of the system in the Petri Net Toolbox which portrays graphical scenes in the MATLAB programming based on the mathematical modeling. The first case represented the impact of RFID in the mixed mode manufacturing system. The second case demonstrated the comparison between RFID and barcode reader. It also contributed the benefits driven by RFID to improve system performance. The last case presented the comparison model between RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for the process control of distributed system. Keywords: Radio-frequency identification (RFID), intelligent system, distributed manufacturing system, Petri Net. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………